Monthly Archives: November 2010

A complicated card trick that deals with the colors of the cards and a binary De Bruijn cycle has helped a mathematician reach a new bound on data compression. Magic and math, more friendly than you’d think!

Here’s how the trick works: You hand your friend a deck of cards and ask them to draw six cards (in order) and name the colors. With that sequence of colors, you can immediately name the exact cards that have been drawn. How? Because each color sequence is unique and appears only once throughout the deck (after pre-arranging it to be so), so if you have an insane memory, you’ll know which cards correspond to the sequence.

According to Travis Gagie from the University of Chile in Santiago, the trick is closely related to data compression:

Gagie achieves this new [mathematical] bound by considering a related trick. Instead of pre-arranging the cards, you shuffle the pack and then ask your friend to draw seven cards. He or she then lists the cards’ colours, replaces them in the pack and cuts the deck. You then examine the deck and say which cards were drawn. This time you’re relying on probability to get the right answer. “It is not hard to show that the probability of two septuples of cards having the same colours in the same order is at most 1/128,”

This turns out to be closely related to various problems of data compression and leads to a lower bound than has been found by any other means.

These fear-in-a-can cans by Hoxton Monster Supplies are perfect: the unassuming typeface, color and laugh out loud descriptions make for a great gag gift. I’ll take a vague sense of unease and escalating panic please.

»Feeling the spirit of Thanksgiving, American ingenuity, or invention? Why not take a look at this homage to the light bulb, get the skinny on 15 founding father invention myths, check out some painful looking tattoo machines, marvel at tesla coils, or admire 10 antique phonographs. [Oobject]

Like this:

How about this for a ridiculous modern myth. There is a machine somewhere in America that can take virtually any sort of waste – offal from an abattoir, old tyres, junked computers – and turn it into high quality oil, plus pure minerals and clean water, all in a few hours. It is an invention that could change the world. Not only might it end the wests, and in particular Americas, dependence on imported oil, but it has also the potential simultaneously to solve the increasingly pressing problem of waste disposal.

Changing World Technologies (CWT), founded in August 1997, is committed to addressing energy and environmental problems simultaneously. Using our patented Thermal Conversion Process (TCP) we are able to transform organic wastes into valuable products without further destroying our delicate planet. CWT is forging a viable economic benefit from a dangerous environmental burden.

The world’s first luxury electric bicycle is coming to earth soon!
Official reveal: 2010 EUROBIKE

Recently more and more electric bicycles are appearing city streets. While the new trend of electric bike development is a welcome improvement, it is flawed by heavy compromises. Most E-bikes available today are rather primitive machines. The majority of the electric bike kits contain no more than a hub motor and a frame-mounted battery cell. The development of these power assist vehicle models were not based on design, maximum range or maneuverability, but rather the functions they can offer. Most of these models are neither suitable to be used as bicycles, nor as successful e-bike. They offer a little of everything, but do not satisfy any specific requirement. They do what they were designed to: they take their riders from A to B, which is fine for some but not others.

Take a Ride on a Creepy Crawly Robotic SkateboardWho the hell knows when were getting hoverboards? The Land Crawler eXtreme, a creepy 12-legged personal transport bot, is here now, and its only a matter of time before someone figures out how to kick flip one.Made for his son by the Japanese roboticist Vagabond Works, the Land Crawler eXtreme has six pairs of nightmarishly scurrying legs that can support a 175 pound passenger. The current version moves slowly but steadily, though Im sure well see a faster moving version and corresponding X-Games event in the near future. [Singularity Hub via PopSci]

Seth here at Computers 4 life. Starting December 1st every Wednesday for 8 weeks, I will be publishing a series titled “Wiping and Reloading Windows XPThe Right Way”. I will be taking you through from start to finish including:

Have you ever had your computer tell you that your connected to the internet but internet explorer just will not work. This probably started after you got a virus and after removing it you still can not get online. It’s not that bad just follow this simple tutorial…